“These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let Society work for you; and remember that the best of all business is politics” (Frederick Howe, The Confessions of a Monopolist, 1906)
Last week, in a WhatsApp group, I talked with some old friends from school days, almost all classic liberal entrepreneurs, about the following dilemma: how is it possible that a successful businessman like Jorge Paulo Lemann — “forged in the purest capitalism”, as summed up one of my friends — finance, for example, an education magazine like Nova Escola, perhaps the most influential publication in the area, whose content is radically leftist and anti-capitalist, and for which Marxist Paulo Freire is “the greatest Brazilian educator"? For what reason does a guy who made a fortune in capitalism — and who, therefore, can be considered a representative of that system — promote the dissemination of socialist ideas within schools?
It is clear that the dilemma can only exist if the two concrete facts that make it up are known: that Lemann is a prominent capitalist businessman and that, at the same time, institutionally promotes education with a strong Marxist and neo-Marxist bias. My friends knew the first one well. That is why, being classic liberal, they admired Lemann and saw him as an emblem of the market economy. But they ignored the second entirely. They had no idea that the Lemann Foundation would house the Nova Escola, and even less of the importance of this magazine (which, since it was founded by another capitalist entrepreneur, Victor Civita, promotes all sorts of “progressive” agendas in classrooms, radical feminism to third world anti-Americanism) for left-wing ideologues of education. That is why they cannot even conceive, and tend to ridicule as fanciful, that apparent paradox, that of a notorious capitalist fostering a socialist political culture.
But if, in the case of the journalist, the misunderstanding may be due to a certain intellectual destitution, I can guarantee that these friends of mine are intelligent people. No, the problem here is not one of intelligence, but of habit. It resides in an addiction of reasoning, acquired in our elementary education, which consists of analyzing the political reality based on merely encyclopedic definitions, resulting in factually absurd syllogisms like this: if socialism is synonymous with the left, then capitalism can only be right; and therefore, a capitalist businessman would never be an objective ally of leftist radicals.
Curiously, that reasoning defect is itself contaminated with elements of Marxism, starting with the theory of the material determination of consciousness. Thus, a person's ideas would be determined by their respective position in class society. A capitalist entrepreneur — or bourgeois, in classical terminology — would necessarily espouse capitalist ideas and values. A proletarian, in turn, would necessarily defend socialist ideas and values. All of this enshrines in the national imagination a cliché as ridiculous and denied by the facts as difficult to eradicate, even in intelligences above average: the suggestion that employers are (or should be) always on the right; employees, always on the left. Or, in an even more burlesque version, that the rich are on the right; poor, left. The former, to maintain the status quo and guarantee their privileges; the latter, to revolutionize the social structure and improve their living conditions.
Now, reality shows precisely the opposite. It is enough to note that, today, the owners of the greatest fortunes in the world, and especially those who have large foundations in their name, use their large capital to promote leftist agendas (euphemistically called “progressives”), often radical. Perhaps the most striking example is that of George Soros, one of the main financiers of extremist movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and Antifa. There is no need to make much speculation about the reason for this to see the fact that things are really like that.
Therefore, when asked by one of those friends about what my hypothesis would be to explain the dilemma with which I opened this article, I replied that I did not have a fully elaborated one, limiting myself to verifying the objective existence of apparently paradoxical facts. One possible explanation, however, is that, contrary to the materialist axiom, the great capitalist entrepreneurs, holders of economic power, no longer have a bourgeois-capitalist mentality, but, on the contrary, aristocratic and dynastic, wishing to protect themselves from fluctuations of the market through association with political-military power. In that sense, although they have become richer in the market economy, they would no longer consider it conducive to their interests, seeing in the capitalist order a danger rather than an opportunity. Tired of adventures and risks, the former entrepreneur then becomes a new aristocrat.
This hypothesis is reinforced, for example, by the confession of George Soros himself, who, in a significantly article entitled “The Capitalist Threat”, published in The Atlantic in February 1997, writes with all the lyrics, and without an ounce of shame: “Although I made a fortune in the financial market, today I fear that the unrestricted strengthening of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values to all walks of life are threatening our open and democratic society. The main enemy of open society, I believe, is no longer the communist threat, but the capitalist threat”.
In comparison with the long duration of the medieval and absolutist orders — which together amount to almost 15 centuries — the liberal-bourgeois order itself, founded on the free market, would have been an ephemeral episode in human history. Seeming to describe precisely the current scenario of the year 2021, in which the owners of the greatest Western fortunes invest heavily in fostering leftist radicalism and in the procession of the Chinese communist dictatorship, Olavo explains: “A century of economic and political freedom is enough to make some capitalists so formidably wealthy that they no longer want to submit to the whims of the market that enriched them. They want to control it, and the instruments for that are three: the domain of the State, for the implantation of the statist policies necessary for the eternalization of the oligopoly; stimulating socialist and communist movements that invariably favor the growth of state power; and the regimentation of an army of intellectuals who prepare public opinion to say goodbye to bourgeois freedoms and enter happily into a world of omnipresent and obsessive repression (extending to the last details of private life and everyday language), presented as a paradise adorned at the same time with the abundance of capitalism and the 'social justice' of communism. In this new world, the economic freedom essential to the functioning of the system is preserved to the strict extent necessary to enable it to subsidize the extinction of freedom in the political, social, moral, educational, cultural and religious domains. With this, the megacapitalists change the very basis of their power. They no longer rely on wealth as such, but on the control of the political-social process. Control that, freeing them from adventurous exposure to market fluctuations, makes them a durable dynastic power, a neoaristocracy capable of crossing through the variations of fortune and the succession of generations, sheltered in the stronghold of the State and international organizations... The new aristocracy is not born, like the previous one, from military heroism rewarded by the people and blessed by the Church. It is born out of the Machiavellian premeditation based on self-interest and, through a false clergy of subsidized intellectuals, it blesses itself”.
Also in 2004, in a lecture given at the OAB in São Paulo, Olavo explains the problem even more clearly, clarifying why the world financial establishment (Wall Street, Davos, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation etc.) supports invariably movements and organizations with a statist and socialist bias. “To understand this” — says Olavo — “it is necessary to investigate a mechanism that is generated by capitalism itself, and that works like this: the subject, within the market economy, thrives and enriches in such a way that, when he reaches a point, he perceives that he has no more reason to continue subjected to market fluctuations. The market that produced him, from then on, becomes a threat. So it is necessary to fall outside the laws of the market to guarantee the continuation of the great fortune for the following generations. The individual, then, enters with a type of consideration that is no longer capitalist, but that is of a dynastic order… From that moment on, the approach that these people take of society no longer corresponds to a capitalist perspective, but to a perspective of aristocratic type... When these great fortunes start to reason in dynastic terms, they have to overcome the market economy mechanism that constituted them, and there is only one way to do that: you have to dominate the state. This means that the power of these large organizations is economic to a certain extent, but then it becomes a political-military power that is independent of the course of economic affairs because it has the means to direct, dominate and strangle the mechanism of the market. These people [owners of great fortunes] I call metacapitalists. Metacapitalists are those who started out as capitalists, but have already transcended this condition and become a kind of new aristocratic caste”.
Now, if the objective is no longer just to enrich, but to dominate the State, and, more broadly, consciences, which model of political regime took this domain to the verge of perfection, developing a technology to control society never seen in other historical contexts? The socialist model, of course. And it is also obvious that metacapitalists only support socializing measures because they know that, in strictly economic terms, a full socialist regime is a logical and practical impossibility. They know this, moreover, as the Bolshevik Nomenklatura has always known, at least since Lenin launched the New Economic Policy. Complete nationalization of the economy is not feasible, and in order to remain standing, any socialist-type government must tolerate some degree of market economy, albeit in a clandestine manner (see, on this, USSR: The Corrupt Society — The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism, by Konstantin Simis).
It is precisely this mix of capitalist economics and socialist government that has underpinned the new world order that emerged with the end of the Cold War. In a kind of tacit agreement with the communists, the Western meta-capitalists came to the conclusion that it was necessary to create some form of synthesis between the economic dynamism of liberal capitalism and the efficient technology of social control and the imposition of consensus managed by socialist regimes. It is no wonder that, as a prototype of this synthesis, China is rising to the position of hegemonic power in the contemporary world order. With the tolerance, if not the endorsement, of the metacapitalists. As the Chinese intellectual Di Dongsheng, whom I mentioned in a previous article, suggested that Beijing has always had a strong influence on Wall Street, and will again do so after Joe Biden took office. And although all of this still sounds inconceivable to most people (like my liberal friends), the truth is the one that, 100 years ago, the great British novelist HG Wells (a notorious social democrat) wrote: “The big business is by no means antipathetic to communism. The more it grows, the closer it gets to collectivism”. Bingo!
Last week, in a WhatsApp group, I talked with some old friends from school days, almost all classic liberal entrepreneurs, about the following dilemma: how is it possible that a successful businessman like Jorge Paulo Lemann — “forged in the purest capitalism”, as summed up one of my friends — finance, for example, an education magazine like Nova Escola, perhaps the most influential publication in the area, whose content is radically leftist and anti-capitalist, and for which Marxist Paulo Freire is “the greatest Brazilian educator"? For what reason does a guy who made a fortune in capitalism — and who, therefore, can be considered a representative of that system — promote the dissemination of socialist ideas within schools?
It is clear that the dilemma can only exist if the two concrete facts that make it up are known: that Lemann is a prominent capitalist businessman and that, at the same time, institutionally promotes education with a strong Marxist and neo-Marxist bias. My friends knew the first one well. That is why, being classic liberal, they admired Lemann and saw him as an emblem of the market economy. But they ignored the second entirely. They had no idea that the Lemann Foundation would house the Nova Escola, and even less of the importance of this magazine (which, since it was founded by another capitalist entrepreneur, Victor Civita, promotes all sorts of “progressive” agendas in classrooms, radical feminism to third world anti-Americanism) for left-wing ideologues of education. That is why they cannot even conceive, and tend to ridicule as fanciful, that apparent paradox, that of a notorious capitalist fostering a socialist political culture.
Mutatis mutandis, this inability to understand is structurally similar to that of the well-known journalist according to which there is no left in the USA because, after all, the country is "the mecca of capitalism". Naturally, like me, my friends laugh at such an opinion, not realizing that their astonishment at the mere possibility of a great capitalist helping to spread far-left ideas is just a more subtle version of that piece of involuntary humor.
But if, in the case of the journalist, the misunderstanding may be due to a certain intellectual destitution, I can guarantee that these friends of mine are intelligent people. No, the problem here is not one of intelligence, but of habit. It resides in an addiction of reasoning, acquired in our elementary education, which consists of analyzing the political reality based on merely encyclopedic definitions, resulting in factually absurd syllogisms like this: if socialism is synonymous with the left, then capitalism can only be right; and therefore, a capitalist businessman would never be an objective ally of leftist radicals.
Curiously, that reasoning defect is itself contaminated with elements of Marxism, starting with the theory of the material determination of consciousness. Thus, a person's ideas would be determined by their respective position in class society. A capitalist entrepreneur — or bourgeois, in classical terminology — would necessarily espouse capitalist ideas and values. A proletarian, in turn, would necessarily defend socialist ideas and values. All of this enshrines in the national imagination a cliché as ridiculous and denied by the facts as difficult to eradicate, even in intelligences above average: the suggestion that employers are (or should be) always on the right; employees, always on the left. Or, in an even more burlesque version, that the rich are on the right; poor, left. The former, to maintain the status quo and guarantee their privileges; the latter, to revolutionize the social structure and improve their living conditions.
Now, reality shows precisely the opposite. It is enough to note that, today, the owners of the greatest fortunes in the world, and especially those who have large foundations in their name, use their large capital to promote leftist agendas (euphemistically called “progressives”), often radical. Perhaps the most striking example is that of George Soros, one of the main financiers of extremist movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and Antifa. There is no need to make much speculation about the reason for this to see the fact that things are really like that.
Therefore, when asked by one of those friends about what my hypothesis would be to explain the dilemma with which I opened this article, I replied that I did not have a fully elaborated one, limiting myself to verifying the objective existence of apparently paradoxical facts. One possible explanation, however, is that, contrary to the materialist axiom, the great capitalist entrepreneurs, holders of economic power, no longer have a bourgeois-capitalist mentality, but, on the contrary, aristocratic and dynastic, wishing to protect themselves from fluctuations of the market through association with political-military power. In that sense, although they have become richer in the market economy, they would no longer consider it conducive to their interests, seeing in the capitalist order a danger rather than an opportunity. Tired of adventures and risks, the former entrepreneur then becomes a new aristocrat.
This hypothesis is reinforced, for example, by the confession of George Soros himself, who, in a significantly article entitled “The Capitalist Threat”, published in The Atlantic in February 1997, writes with all the lyrics, and without an ounce of shame: “Although I made a fortune in the financial market, today I fear that the unrestricted strengthening of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values to all walks of life are threatening our open and democratic society. The main enemy of open society, I believe, is no longer the communist threat, but the capitalist threat”.
The hypothesis summarized above is not mine, but that of the philosopher Olavo de Carvalho. Almost two decades ago, Olavo was already reflecting on the theme, which even today sounds far-fetched to our provincial speaking class. To qualify types like Soros, Rockefeller, Ford — and, to a lesser extent, perhaps even our Lemann —, the philosopher coined the term metacapitalists. In the article “History of fifteen centuries”, published in the Jornal da Tarde in 2004, metacapitalists are defined as “the class that transcended capitalism and transformed it into the only socialism that ever existed or will exist: the socialism of the grand masters and social engineers at their service”. According to Olavo, unlike the classic capitalist bourgeois, who had accumulated fortune as the sole basis of their power, metacapitalists also base their power on the control of the political, bureaucratic and military apparatus, resembling, in this sense, the old European aristocracies, just that, unlike them — whose power was socially legitimized by the prestige gained thanks to military triumphs against the barbarian invaders, at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire —, the new metacapitalist aristocracy has a power as substantial as it is illegitimate, based solely on self-interest and in the formation of financial and political oligopolies.
In comparison with the long duration of the medieval and absolutist orders — which together amount to almost 15 centuries — the liberal-bourgeois order itself, founded on the free market, would have been an ephemeral episode in human history. Seeming to describe precisely the current scenario of the year 2021, in which the owners of the greatest Western fortunes invest heavily in fostering leftist radicalism and in the procession of the Chinese communist dictatorship, Olavo explains: “A century of economic and political freedom is enough to make some capitalists so formidably wealthy that they no longer want to submit to the whims of the market that enriched them. They want to control it, and the instruments for that are three: the domain of the State, for the implantation of the statist policies necessary for the eternalization of the oligopoly; stimulating socialist and communist movements that invariably favor the growth of state power; and the regimentation of an army of intellectuals who prepare public opinion to say goodbye to bourgeois freedoms and enter happily into a world of omnipresent and obsessive repression (extending to the last details of private life and everyday language), presented as a paradise adorned at the same time with the abundance of capitalism and the 'social justice' of communism. In this new world, the economic freedom essential to the functioning of the system is preserved to the strict extent necessary to enable it to subsidize the extinction of freedom in the political, social, moral, educational, cultural and religious domains. With this, the megacapitalists change the very basis of their power. They no longer rely on wealth as such, but on the control of the political-social process. Control that, freeing them from adventurous exposure to market fluctuations, makes them a durable dynastic power, a neoaristocracy capable of crossing through the variations of fortune and the succession of generations, sheltered in the stronghold of the State and international organizations... The new aristocracy is not born, like the previous one, from military heroism rewarded by the people and blessed by the Church. It is born out of the Machiavellian premeditation based on self-interest and, through a false clergy of subsidized intellectuals, it blesses itself”.
Also in 2004, in a lecture given at the OAB in São Paulo, Olavo explains the problem even more clearly, clarifying why the world financial establishment (Wall Street, Davos, Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundation etc.) supports invariably movements and organizations with a statist and socialist bias. “To understand this” — says Olavo — “it is necessary to investigate a mechanism that is generated by capitalism itself, and that works like this: the subject, within the market economy, thrives and enriches in such a way that, when he reaches a point, he perceives that he has no more reason to continue subjected to market fluctuations. The market that produced him, from then on, becomes a threat. So it is necessary to fall outside the laws of the market to guarantee the continuation of the great fortune for the following generations. The individual, then, enters with a type of consideration that is no longer capitalist, but that is of a dynastic order… From that moment on, the approach that these people take of society no longer corresponds to a capitalist perspective, but to a perspective of aristocratic type... When these great fortunes start to reason in dynastic terms, they have to overcome the market economy mechanism that constituted them, and there is only one way to do that: you have to dominate the state. This means that the power of these large organizations is economic to a certain extent, but then it becomes a political-military power that is independent of the course of economic affairs because it has the means to direct, dominate and strangle the mechanism of the market. These people [owners of great fortunes] I call metacapitalists. Metacapitalists are those who started out as capitalists, but have already transcended this condition and become a kind of new aristocratic caste”.
Now, if the objective is no longer just to enrich, but to dominate the State, and, more broadly, consciences, which model of political regime took this domain to the verge of perfection, developing a technology to control society never seen in other historical contexts? The socialist model, of course. And it is also obvious that metacapitalists only support socializing measures because they know that, in strictly economic terms, a full socialist regime is a logical and practical impossibility. They know this, moreover, as the Bolshevik Nomenklatura has always known, at least since Lenin launched the New Economic Policy. Complete nationalization of the economy is not feasible, and in order to remain standing, any socialist-type government must tolerate some degree of market economy, albeit in a clandestine manner (see, on this, USSR: The Corrupt Society — The Secret World of Soviet Capitalism, by Konstantin Simis).
It is precisely this mix of capitalist economics and socialist government that has underpinned the new world order that emerged with the end of the Cold War. In a kind of tacit agreement with the communists, the Western meta-capitalists came to the conclusion that it was necessary to create some form of synthesis between the economic dynamism of liberal capitalism and the efficient technology of social control and the imposition of consensus managed by socialist regimes. It is no wonder that, as a prototype of this synthesis, China is rising to the position of hegemonic power in the contemporary world order. With the tolerance, if not the endorsement, of the metacapitalists. As the Chinese intellectual Di Dongsheng, whom I mentioned in a previous article, suggested that Beijing has always had a strong influence on Wall Street, and will again do so after Joe Biden took office. And although all of this still sounds inconceivable to most people (like my liberal friends), the truth is the one that, 100 years ago, the great British novelist HG Wells (a notorious social democrat) wrote: “The big business is by no means antipathetic to communism. The more it grows, the closer it gets to collectivism”. Bingo!
